Arthur writes:
Figuring out who we are can be as difficult as it is obvious… obvious if you know where to look, how to draw it out and expand on it. I am Arthur and that’s what I do… help you to find that inner, passionate rage which is your mission... and become wholly, completely and forever unstoppable in all that you do and are, while living and beyond, by Creating and Keeping Your Stories.
Now that Arthur is going to be offering journaling classes, I was spurred to check out what I could find online as far as other people teaching journaling.
I was really disappointed. I don't want to overgeneralize. I don't want to badmouth. But at least as far as my researching online, there were some slim pickings out there. It seemed that many of the videos and websites talked around what journaling is. Their advice seemed jumbled, vague, and contrived. No doubt the people who made these videos are doing things like keeping diaries, and writing their thoughts in journals, but it was for the most part different than the directed kind of journaling Arthur speaks of.
I think the reason for the lack of a solid presentation on journaling is the prevalence in American society of "moral relativism". "Moral relativism" is a fancy way of saying there is no absolute right and wrong.
Underlying Arthur's approach is the concept that there is a right and wrong. His starting point is that everyone has a "mission". And that someone, through journaling, can discover their mission. Just as a a navigator looks to the stars to orient himself and keep himself on the right course, each of us has to stay the course to fulfill our mission.
That means we have to constantly ask ourselves, "Am I on-course or off-course?" That's a very different take than that embodied by, say, Jon Stewart, which is an attitude that everything, including ourselves, is open to mocking, and the only thing that is sacred is the idea that all must have the freedom to do whatever they feel like.
To put it another way, the message of the Daily Show was your implicit mission is "do whatever you like without harming the next person. Muddling through the issues of life is what it is all about."
Jon Stewart has often made the point that his brand of comedy works well precisely because it is confined to a comedy channel. But life is not artificially constricted to the dimensions of a make-believe sound stage world. Shakespeare wrote, "All the world's a stage." We'd like to think so, but it might be said that all the world is real. Life is not a game, a show, or all fun. And someone who misses that message misses out on the pleasure of being alive, instead sleepwalking through the day.
Journaling is an opportunity to wake us up from our slumber and confront challenges, overcome them, and become, in Arthur's words, "unstoppable".
No comments:
Post a Comment